★ ★ ★ ½
Nocturnal Animals, director Tom Ford’s dark, disturbing, and exceedingly violent revenge fantasia, is in parts a thriller, a mystery, a melodrama, a modern-day Western, an existential noir, and a heartbreaking love story. It’s also a caustic commentary on the well-heeled world in which Ford resides. In short, it’s a mixed bag of cinematic goodies that never quite settles on a distinct style or vision, but nevertheless grips you with its raw power and assured storytelling.
Amy Adams stars as Susan Morrow, a chic Los Angeles art-gallery owner who feels “ungrateful not to be happy.” Why? Outwardly, she has everything: successful career; handsome husband (an underused Armie Hammer); sleek L.A. pad with a sprawling view of the city; designer gowns; stunning beauty. But Susan is slowly realizing a bitter truth: The glossy, materialistic world she lives in is, at its core, hollow. It can’t satisfy the deepest needs and yearnings of her heart, or squelch her increasing feelings of inadequacy and guilt. She also recognizes -- too late -- that the past can’t be undone, mistakes carry consequences that can last a lifetime, and that one’s worst fears often come true. All of this becomes savagely clear when Susan receives a manuscript from her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sensitive, would-be writer she divorced two decades earlier for being, in her view, weak and unambitious.
The book is titled Nocturnal Animals, a reference to the insomnia-plagued Susan, and it’s even dedicated to her. As she begins reading, Ford brings the novel’s pages -- as imagined by Susan -- to vivid life. A family -- Tony (Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher), and their daughter India (Ellie Bamber) -- drive down a lonely stretch of West Texas highway at night and are terrorized by a trio of young thugs led by ringleader Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, frightening and merciless), who run their car off the road. What follows is brutal and sadistic, a hellish nightmare rendered with unflinching realism. Adding to Susan’s uneasiness is the increasing likelihood that this sordid tale is actually a thinly veiled critique of her short-lived marriage to Edward and an unconscionable decision that changed the course of their lives. “Nobody gets away with what you did,” Tony threatens Ray at one point, but the real accusation, Susan knows, is unmistakably one Edward is making directly to her.
Ford, who adapted Nocturnal Animals from Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, expertly juggles the story’s multiple threads as the narrative bounces back and forth between Susan’s present-day life, the horror unfolding in Edward’s text, and Susan’s memories of her time with Edward. This is only Ford’s sophomore effort after 2009’s well-received A Single Man, and he brings the same keen eye to filmmaking that he does to fashion design. His compositions are, unsurprisingly, crisp and expertly detailed. (The end credits read like a Who’s Who of the fashion industry.) And he elicits exceptional performances from his impeccable cast. Adams, already generating Oscar buzz for her work in the sci-fi drama Arrival, is nothing short of sensational as she burrows beneath Susan’s icy veneer to make us feel every inch of her insecurity and loneliness. Equally stunning are Gyllenhaal, in a difficult dual role; Michael Shannon, as a chain-smoking Texas lawman who isn’t above breaking the rules to see that justice is carried out; and Laura Linney, as Susan’s malevolent, pearl-draped mother.
But Nocturnal Animals isn’t flawless. Ford is obviously enamored of other directors and, at times, borrows too heavily from them. The opening, with grotesquely obese nude women parading around like burlesque drum majorettes in an art installation at Susan’s gallery, is straight out of the David Lynch playbook, and Abel Korzeniowski’s lush, evocative score feels like it was lifted directly out of a Douglas Sirk tearjerker. There are also hints of Hitchcock, De Palma, and the Coen brothers -- but hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
While revenge-soaked and delivering a withering indictment of what one character calls “junk culture,” Nocturnal Animals is best viewed as a piercing cautionary tale that offers a simple, life-altering truth, one Edward reminds Susan of just as she is about to end their relationship: “When you love someone, you have to be careful with it. You might never get it back.”